SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

HTML::BBReverse is a pure perl module for converting BBCode to HTML and is able to convert the generated HTML back to BBCode.

And why would you want to reverse the generated HTML? Well, when you have a nice dynamic website where you and/or visitors can post messages, and in those messages BBCode is used for markup. In normal cases, your website has a lot more pageviews than edits, and saving all those messages as HTML will be a lot faster than saving them as the original BBCode and parsing them to HTML for every visit.

So now all BBCode gets converted to HTML before it will be saved, but what if you want to edit a message? Just reverse the generated HTML back to BBCode, edit your message, and save it as HTML again.

new

new creates a new HTML::BBReverse object using the configuration passed to it.

options

The following options can be passed to new:

allowed_tags

Specifies which BBCode tags will be parsed, for the current supported tags, see the list of supported tags below. Defaults to all supported tags.

reverse_for_edit

When set to a positive value, the reverse method will parse &, > and < to their HTML entity equivalent. This option is useful when reversing HTML to BBCode for editing in a browser, in a normal textarea. When set to zero, the reverse method should just ignore these characters. Defaults to 1.

in_paragraph

Specifies wether the generated HTML is used between HTML paragraphs (<p> and </p>), and adds a </p> in front of and a <p> after every list. (XHTML 1.0 strict document types do not allow lists in paragraphs) Defaults to 0.

no_jslink

When true, URLs starting with javascript: will be disabled for the [url] and [img] tags. Enabled by default.

parse

Parses BBCode text supplied as a single scalar string and returns the HTML as a single scalar string. See Supported tags below for the supported tags and their usage.

reverse

Parses HTML generated from parse supplied as a single scalar string and returns BBCode as a single scalar string. Note that this method can only be used to reverse HTML generated by the parse method of this module, it won't be able to parse just any HTML to BBCode

SUPPORTED TAGS

The following BBCode tags are supported:

b, i, u

Standard markup tags, any text between [b] and [/b] will be bold, text between [i] and [/i] will be italic and text between [u] and [/u] will be underlined. For example:

Used to quote someone (or something), syntax is similar to the img tag. Optional argument specifies the quoted author. For example:

[quote]Who said this?[/quote]
[quote=Bill Gates]
The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter
how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.
[/quote]

Will be parsed to:

<span class="bbcode_quote_header">Quote:
<span class="bbcode_quote_body">Who said this?</span></span>
<span class="bbcode_quote_header">Bill Gates wrote:
<span class="bbcode_quote_body">
The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter
how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.
</span></span>

url

[url=/some/url]link text[/url]

Creates a clickable link, argument is required. The above example will generate the following HTML:

<a href="/some/url">link text</a>

email

[email]email@example.org[/email]

Creates a clickable mailto: link. The above example will generate the following HTML:

<a href="mailto:email@example.org">
email@example.org</a>

size

[size=30]huge[/size]

The size tag controls the size of the text in pixels. The above example will generate the following HTML:

<span style="font-size: 30px">huge</span><!--2-->

Note the <!--2-->, this HTML-comment is added for reverse to see the difference between the same end-tags.

color

[color=red]Red[/color]

Changes the color of the text, the color can be in any acceptable HTML-format: color-names or hex-codes (preceded with a #). The above example will generate the following HTML:

<span style="color: red">Red</span><!--3-->

list

The list tag can be used to create lists of various types. Between the [list] and [/list] tags can the special [*] tag be used to specify an item. The [list] tag itself accepts one optional argument to specify the style of the list, which can be one of the following:

SEE ALSO

CAVEATS

Laziness

HTML::BBReverse is a lazy module, which simply means it does not check any syntax, and just converts any BBCode to HTML (or back), even when the input contains errors like wrong nested tags or even close tags without start tags or start tags without close tags. Therefore, wrong input means wrong output. Note though that reversing HTML which is generated with parse with 'wrong' BBCode as input, should still give the same 'wrong' BBCode as output.

Lists formatting

The space between a code start tag ([code]) and the first item ([*]) will be completely ignored, and replaced with a linebreak. For example: When you parse

[list]some
text or [b]bbcode[/b]
here[*]item[/list]

to HTML, and reverse it back to BBCode, it will give the following output:

[list]
[*]item[/list]

This 'feature' (some might call it a bug) is added because it is not allowed to have content between <ul> and the first <li> in (X)HTML.

BUGS

TODO

HTML::BBReverse is still in development, and new functions will probably be added.

Syntax checking

An extra method which checks the syntax of BBCode and maybe the generated HTML, and an option to new where you can configure wether the syntax should be checked before a parse of reverse, and what to do if there is a syntax error.

Automatically parse URLs and e-mails

An extra option to new which specifies wether parse should automatically parse URLs and e-mail addresses to clickable links.

If you think of a useful feature which you would like to see in HTML::BBCode, just contact the author!

Of course HTML::BBReverse also needs a little more testing and bugfixes before it will be considered stable.